Category: DIY

Classic Video Pong Kit

DIY Pong Game

Super! Just the way to spend a project evening.

Blocky table tennis with a ball and two paddles was one of the first real video games to make it into mainstream culture. It took an awful lot of high-tech electronics in 1972 to create this classic game. Now however you can cobble together your very own Classic Video Table Tennis Game with a little determination and some basic soldering skillz. This kit contains a pre-printed circuit board and 39 various resistors, diodes, and capacitors. Solder everything together (following the instructions we hope) and plug the audio and video into any standard TV for instant Table Tennis action. You can play against another lowly human or challenge the computer at four different skill levels.

I wonder if the kit can be hacked to make variations on the game… Hockey or even handball???

ThinkGeek :: Classic Video Table Tennis Kit

Making Put-Put Boats

Put-Put boats

 

I saw this today on Flickr.

The put put boat is a steam powered boat. In this use, they are hand made from either baking pan aluminum or flashing. The boiler is made by cutting and flattening a soda can, folding it, then epoxying in two straws.

I remember building these when I was a little kid. It’s a great way to learn a bit about steam power. And what floats and what won’t. 🙂

 

fussing with stuff: 032 – Hand Cut Put Put Boat

Alpha Radiation Visualizer

Alpha detector

Have a webcam and a smoke detector? If you do you can make a clever alpha particle visualizer. An alpha particle is an ionizing form of radiation that is made up of two protons and two neutrons. It’s powerful but doesn’t penetrate very far, paper or your skin is enough to stop them. Inside smoke detectors is a tiny chunk of americium that produces alpha particles when it decays. If you place some of this near the CCD of a web cam you can see flashes of white light as the particle strikes the capacitors and over charges them. Over time this could destroy the device, as radiation can do to space craft or robots that work near harsh radioactive sources, but in this case it makes for a good practical visualization of radiation. This would make for a fine science fair project.

[via hack-a-day] 

Alpha Radiation Visualizer – Overview

PXL2000 – Alive and Well

PXL2000PXL2000

Any one remember the Fisher-Price PLX2000 video camera? Yeah, it’s the one that recorded a smaller than normal sized video image (gutter boxed) onto regular audio cassette tape. It was meant for kids but it soon found a following with video artists all over the place. I used to have a few of them, one I even modded to have a direct video out so the picture quality would be better because it could feed into a regular VTR directly. Anyway, I was tooling around the backwaters of YouTube yesterday and discovered that some people have uploaded and tagged footage from these cameras. I have a link here so you can see the classic camera in action. If you have any footage, and you can still play the tapes back on your camera, you should upload them and join in the fun.

YouTube – tag ‘pxl’ 

PongSats

PongSats

Now you can send you own scientific experiment into near space. As long as it fits into the space of a ping-pong ball:

A PongSat is an experiment that fits inside of a ping pong ball.
These ping pong ball ‘satellites’ are flown to the edge of space by balloon or launched in sounding rockets. The PongSats are then returned to the student. It’s an easy and inexpensive way to get students excited about science and engineering. There are endless possibilities for experiments that can fit inside a ping pong ball. PongSat’s can be as simple or complex as you want them to be. Experiments can be as simple as comparing how high a ball bounces before and after being exposed to vacuum. The PongSat can carry seeds to see if exposure to cosmic rays effect their growth. Several small inexpensive computers and other electronic can fit inside a PongSat. These can be used to create a wide range of experiments. Whether carrying a marshmallow to see if it puffs up in the vacuum of near space or an entire sophisticated satellite in miniature, PongSat can create motivation, drive and passion in the classroom.
PongSats are flown at no cost to the student or school.

How cool is that? Some flights have reached over 100,000 feet, that’s definitely high enough to measure the UV index or even gamma rays if your detector is small enough.

[via neatorama] 

PongSats